Russ Meyer’s cult film portrays the über-Amazonian Asian-Cherokee Tura Satana as the leader of a trio of murderous young women in fast sportscars wreaking havoc in the desert

Cult movies existed before this, but cult consciousness was born here—one of those assaults that only such marginal murmurs can make on whatever distinctions between low and high art anyone still takes seriously. Of course this also is where all kinds of social incorrectness reach critical mass; we can protest, but why the hell bother? Directed by former Playboy-centerfold photographer Russ Meyer, auteur of other enlightenments like Up! and Beneath the Valley of the Super Vixens, this movie means no good, taking its place on the far side of any possible redemption and implanting itself in the memory as something that, on further inspection, in fact it isn’t (condemned with an X rating, actually there’s not a moment of nudity or even, by current standards, any explicit depiction of sex).

What there is—as the leader of a trio of murderous young women in fast sportscars (as if the movies ever show us slow ones) wreaking havoc in the desert—is the über-Amazonian (a redundancy applied to anyone else) Asian-Cherokee Tura Satana, a force of the most unnatural nature and straight from the fevered dreams that you like to convince yourself are nightmares only because you think they should be. If anything is more astonishing than Satana in this movie it’s her real-life bio as gangbanger, stripper, Elvis Presley’s lover, and martial arts vigilante avenging her own rape. It all sounds preposterous and may be, but who wants to know otherwise?